Matt SaffordSilverStone Raven RV05There's a lot to like about the SilverStone Raven RV05 PC case, with quiet, efficient cooling, and room for larger graphics cards, but the unique layout and moderate drive support may not be everyone's cup of tea.

Build quality is modest in places. No external drive bays. Room for only two 3.5-inch hard drives. Requires a slot-loading slim optical drive. Cable routing can be tricky.

Bottom Line

There's a lot to like about the SilverStone Raven RV05 PC case, with quiet, efficient cooling, and room for larger graphics cards, but the unique layout and moderate drive support may not be everyone's cup of tea.

SilverStone's Raven PC-case line—like certain chassis in the company's Fortress family, such as the iconic Fortress FT02—is known for its unique rotated motherboard mounting scheme. This design is predicated on pulling in cool air from the bottom of the case and allowing it to rise naturally, via convection, up and out of the top.

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While this seems to work quite well, allowing for efficient, quiet cooling, it also puts the usual bank of "rear" ports at the top of the case, behind a removable grille. If that sounds strange...well, it is. That placement can be inconvenient if you're often plugging in and unplugging devices. It also limits the vertical clearance for your plugs to just a couple of inches. (You won't appreciate that if, say, you have a stiff HDMI cable or bulky adapter connecting to one of your video-card ports.)

Beyond the motherboard rotation, the other thing that could be said of previous Raven cases is that they've been large and somewhat expensive. That changes with the company's latest revision, the Raven RV05.

Now, this model certainly won't be mistaken for a small-form-factor (SFF) case, at just over 20 inches tall and 20 inches deep, but it's more compact than the Raven RV03, while still making room for a full-size ATX motherboard. Plus, at $105 for SilverStone's non-windowed, slab-sided version of this case, or $117 for the windowed one we're looking at here, the Raven RV05 is priced as a midrange case, not a high-end one.

Midrange or high-end, though, this case is made for intrepid builders. It's far from the easiest case to build a system into, due to its somewhat cramped quarters and the relative lack of cable-routing space. But once you're done with the assembly odyssey, there's a payoff: The Raven RV05 delivers excellent, quiet cooling, largely thanks to two massive 180mm fans.

This chassis is a good option for gamers, with room for up to three foot-long graphics cards. But those who intend to install oodles of internal storage should look elsewhere. The case has bays for only two 3.5-inch hard drives and two solid-state-drives (SSDs), which seems a bit scanty considering that this is no compact, shrinking-violet case. And if you need an optical drive, you'll have to spring for a specialized slim, slot-loading model. The case has no traditional external drive bays, so you can't just pop in a standard, cheap 5.25-inch tray-loader.

Design

The Raven RV05 retains the stealthy black aesthetics of its predecessors. A thin, swooping strip a third of the way down the front lights up white when the system is powered on, which helps to make the all-black design feel less monolithic.

To the right and below the white light strip is a thin, vertical slot, which is where you'll feed and retrieve discs, should you choose to buy a slim, slot-loading optical drive...

These days, most users can live without an optical drive most of the time, and maybe break out a USB external optical drive on the rare occasions when they need it. If you do want to install a built-in optical drive, though, you'll have far fewer models to choose from with this case. (We couldn't imagine putting together a desktop in a chassis with a disc-load slot that we'd leave nonfunctional, but maybe that's just us and our PC-purist sensibilities.)

However, it's just a DVD burner, rather than a Blu-ray drive, which makes its asking price ($69 on Amazon when we wrote this, but it's been that for years) about three times what you'd pay for a comparable 5.25-inch standard DVD drive. Alternatively, Panasonic makes a slim slot-loading optical drive that costs about the same, and which should also fit in the Raven case. Rather than a plain old DVD drive, however, the Panasonic drive is also a 6x Blu-ray writer.

If you opt for the Panasonic drive, you won't have to pay much more than what you'd spend for a standard 5.25-inch Blu-ray drive. But you'll still have to buy a new drive. With most other ATX cases, you could just carry over a drive from your previous build or an old PC. (Note: Depending on the seller, make sure the slimline drive specifically comes with a desktop interface cable; these kinds of slimline opticals often require a nonstandard cable, as you can see on the back of the SOD02 above.)

Unlike the optical-drive situation, the top-mounted ports are standard fare for a modern case. You get two blue USB 3.0 ports and a pair of audio jacks....

SilverStone includes a rubber cover for these ports when they're not in use. The cover isn't tethered to the case, so you'll have to be careful not to lose it.

The first real indication of the Raven's truly unconventional design: We actually had to break out the manual (which is printed on remarkably high-quality paper, by the way) to figure out how to get the side panels off. First, as we expected, you have to pop off the plastic top grille, here shown attached...

To actually remove the side doors, you actuate a lever that's hidden inside the top of the case, on the back side of each door.

Once you know what to do, the latches are easy to find, and the mechanism works well to keep the doors held on firmly without screws. But even veteran system builders will be a bit perplexed by this.

We do like the fact that SilverStone has included a couple of removable fan filters. The first pops out of the front at the bottom and covers the two large 180mm Air Penetrator intake fans (the only two included in the box)...

A second filter attaches to the back magnetically, near the top, where there's an intake for the (non-included) power supply...

Here, you can see how the rotated mainboard design makes the back of the Raven RV05 actually pleasing to look at, as opposed to the usual grim-looking sea of cables, exposed connectors, bare metal, and expansion slots on the back of a PC case. This case back looks finished. That design detail makes this case (or one like it in SilverStone's line) an excellent choice for use on a desk where the back side of your tower will be exposed for all to see, such as in an office with outward-facing desks.

Features

Inside the Raven RV05, SilverStone gives you plenty of options for installing different configurations of hardware, but given how big the case is, there's relatively little space to work with. That's especially true once you start installing components and have to work around what's in there.

One of the reasons? The orientation of not only the motherboard, but also the power supply. As we mentioned earlier on, the motherboard mounts at 90 degrees off of normal, with the rear ports shifted to face the top. As a result, the power supply also gets rotated, with its exhaust facing the top of the case. (It does remain, though, in the upper-left corner.) That leaves the body of the supply projecting down into the case. You can see what we mean here, in this shot of the interior of our test build...

The rotated power supply has possible ramifications for your storage options, because a small cage for two 3.5-inch hard drives sits below the power supply; you can see it here closer-up at lower left...

If you need a high-wattage power supply that's longer than the ATX-standard 5.5 inches, you'll probably have to remove this drive cage altogether to make the supply fit. And that would mean relying strictly on SSDs or 2.5-inch hard drives for your system's internal storage.

What's even more unusual: Those smaller drives wouldn't even get installed in the main motherboard area. The RV05's pair of 2.5-inch drive mounts is on the back side of the motherboard tray, which is also where you'll find the mounting holes for the slim optical drive, should you decide to install one...

If you do plan on installing a pair of SSDs around back, you'll find making space for the cabling at least a little inconvenient. There's just barely enough clearance in this space to house the cables from the drives, alongside other cables we routed through the tight spaces around the motherboard.

You'll absolutely want to spring for a modular power supply with this case. SilverStone helpfully provided one for the build of this review (a 550-watt Strider Gold Series). But even with as few cables installed as possible, it was a tough fit getting the right-side panel back on the Raven RV05 after our build. As you can see, the case starts with its own pretty thick bundle of cables you'll need to account for...

You'll want to plan your routing very carefully when building, opt for the thinnest cables you can get (that are just long enough, to boot), and otherwise plan to minimize cable bulk.

If you need more cooling, though, there you have room to expand. You can mount a 120mm exhaust fan up top to supplement the two pie-sized fans below. And there's room in the bottom for a large radiator. Again, though, if you opt for something larger than a dual-140mm-fan radiator (say, a 120mm x3 or 180mm x2 radiator, both technically supported), you'll have to remove the 3.5-inch hard drive cage, at least in part.

How "in part"? A nice touch is that the RV05's hard drive cage is modular. You can remove just half of it, and still leave room for a single 3.5-inch drive, while making space for a radiator or other components. Given the capacity of today's top platter drives, one might be enough for you.

Build Considerations

We built a fairly modest system in the RV05, comprising a few drives, an AMD Radeon HD 7950 graphics card, a Biostar Hi-Fi Z97WE motherboard, and a Cooler Master air cooler. For our setup, with a single graphics card and a stock-clocked Intel Core i7-4770K CPU, the pair of included 180mm intake fans was more than sufficient to keep the system running cool and quiet, even on a hot day...

The fans have switches up top to adjust their spin rate to one of three speed settings. We found the middle setting just fine, and near silent. But even at their highest setting, the two large fans together were quieter than the single smaller fan on our CPU cooler.

A couple notes about the build process, though. Even though we didn't overload the case with components, it wasn't easy to squeeze the cables through the small areas allotted around the motherboard tray...

If you drop in a second graphics card and an optical drive, as well as a radiator, you're going to need a lot of patience (and build experience) to get everything installed and routed cleanly.

Also, while we wouldn't say the case feels cheap, it's far from the most solid-feeling one we've built in, even in this price range. The doors are mostly steel and feel good and rigid, thanks in part to the well-designed locking mechanism. The front and top, by contrast, are plastic, and the top grille, in particular, flexes more than we'd like. But since you'll have to pop it on and off every time you want to access a port on the rear panel, perhaps flexibility is better than rigidity.

Another thing we noticed: The metal holding one of the motherboard screw holes on the tray bent when we installed the first motherboard we tried in this case. We only noticed it after swapping out the first board, which for some reason wouldn't boot reliably. When we went to install our second motherboard, the Biostar model we mentioned earlier, one of the mounting holes wouldn't line up. Once we figured out why, it was easy enough to bend the piece back a bit, and everything worked fine.

Conclusion

Because it doesn't feel overly sturdy, we wouldn't recommend the SilverStone Raven RV05 for buyers who expect to swap major parts in and out frequently (say, in a lab or test-bed environment). But given the case's space constraints and other complexities, it would be a poor choice for that purpose, anyway. Overall, we wouldn't say the build quality is excellent, but it's not bad for a case with a novel layout that doesn't cost much more than $100.

The Raven RV05 is a unique case, which will find fans among those looking for impressive and quiet air cooling, who have a few system builds under their collective belt, and who don't need to install banks of hard drives. With room for up to three dual-width graphics cards, it can handle a powerful collection of hardware without taking up as much space as the massive towers that typically house triple-card gaming rigs. And at just under $120 as of this writing (or a tenner or so less if you don't want a window on the left side of the case), it's far more affordable than many chassis we've seen that can accommodate extreme gaming setups.

SilverStone Raven RV05

Bottom Line: There's a lot to like about the SilverStone Raven RV05 PC case, with quiet, efficient cooling, and room for larger graphics cards, but the unique layout and moderate drive support may not be everyone's cup of tea.

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About the Author

Matt is a self-described Net nerd, gadget geek, and general connoisseur of off-kilter culture. A graduate of the first class of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, his work has appeared in Popular Science, Consumer Reports, Smithsonian, and elsewhere in the ether. You'll often find him writing while walking on his treadmill desk, surrounded by ... See Full Bio

SilverStone Raven RV05

SilverStone Raven RV05

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